


Babylon

by epistolic



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-02
Updated: 2013-12-02
Packaged: 2018-01-03 06:00:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1066850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/epistolic/pseuds/epistolic
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“They can’t hurt me,” she tells him. She leans against his shoulder. It’ll be in all the tabloids, tomorrow.</p><p>“They can always hurt you,” Finnick says.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Babylon

The door opens. 

She is wet, dirty, bleeding on the front step. She can’t see out of her left eye. One hand clutches at her stomach – it feels like she is trying to hold her guts in, but really it’s just blood, muscle, nothing that will kill her if she doesn’t let it. Nothing that she can’t replace.

Her mother sees her there and screams. A rack of pastry, freshly baked, goes clattering to the ground.

What has she done? Really, she has done nothing: met a pack of wolves on her way towards home in the forest, like something out of a fairy tale. She is twelve. She’d had an axe with her and hadn’t quite known how to use it. She is still bleeding, bleeding all over these steps she cleaned just this morning, she’ll have to clean them again. What a waste. She cries. Her mother drags her inside.

She does not stir for six whole days. The fever wracks its way through her body, scours her veins, blisters beneath her closed eyelids, chases the little girl out of her blood. 

On the seventh day, she wakes.

\--

“Hold up.”

Finnick catches her arm. A touch too familiar, as always. Everybody is watching Finnick, which is the standard state of affairs; and now, because he’s reached for her, everybody is watching her too. 

The touch of Midas.

She scowls at him. “What?”

“My, you’re prickly tonight, aren’t you?”

“I’m busy.” Her glass is empty and she’s hunting for a fresh one. The lighting is bad; faces wobble in and out of the brightness, as if they’re standing on the deck of a ship. “Go find someone else to chat up. I’m sure there are plenty of willing _candidates_ here in this room.”

Finnick gives her a smile that shows teeth. “True. But none of those _candidates_ are you.”

“Fuck off.”

He winds an arm into the crook of her elbow. She can feel his muscles bunching underneath his skin, the unspoken tension. The first night is always the hardest – harder for him, ostensibly, with a client list that stretches to the floor, but it’s hard on her too. The _if only_ ’s are for her alone. If only I had said yes. If only I had listened. It would’ve been worth it, she knows that now: a family, in exchange for something she doesn’t give a fuck about any more. Anything, she decides, is better than not giving a fuck.

“You’re hurt,” Finnick says, peering closely at her hand.

She laughs. She lets her empty glass slip theatrically to the floor: relishes the shattering crush of it. 

Eyes dart her way, appalled. 

There is a fresh gash on her palm, something she doesn’t remember getting. She folds her fingers into it. It’s slippery. She likes being unexpected, likes being the unsettling influence, the bomb in the corner that may or may not go off. She likes destruction, now. Her whole body burns with it.

“They can’t hurt me,” she tells him. She leans against his shoulder. It’ll be in all the tabloids, tomorrow.

“They can always hurt you,” Finnick says.

\--

It had happened like this:

Something showy, something to make a point. A massacre in a clearing in the woods to the north, _bears_ , they’d said, watching her as she stood over the bodies on their neat white slabs in the morgue. Her father looking as if he’d swallowed a shotgun. Her mother, frail, looking somewhat confused, hands stiff from where they’d prised them away from the bullet hole in her stomach; her little sisters, both of them. A neighbour’s boy who’d slept over for the night. She’d grabbed at him, but the eyes were wrong, the face.

Her head had filled with a sudden roaring of white noise. She hadn’t screamed – not until afterward.

“They don’t do that,” Finnick says. He’s watching her like she’s a wild animal backed into a cage. “They never wipe out everybody. They need to leave one or two for leverage.”

“You speaking from personal experience?”

“They have Annie,” Finnick says.

She’s bent over the sink, being sick into it. She wipes her mouth.

“I never had an Annie,” she says.

\--

Blight shakes her awake. She almost kills him: remembers not to at the last moment.

Blight’s alright. He’s a towering shadow, blocking out half the light in her room. He has large, amber-coloured eyes, rough hands, a gruff and almost perplexed way with words. 

“You were shouting,” he explains. His voice has a rumbling quality, like he’s talking from beneath the ground.

She pats about for a cigarette. “I’m always shouting.”

“Nightmare?”

“What do you care,” she snaps at him.

Blight shrugs. He doesn’t care, probably. They all have their own secrets, their own miserable little stories that they clutch to their bodies as tightly as they can; in most cases, it’s all they have left. It’s all that the Capitol has left them with, as a reminder.

“Mine are about the snow,” Blight says. He thinks for a moment. “I don’t really know why.”

“It’s because your Games had a blizzard in it, you idiot.”

“No.” He shakes his head, still ponderous. “I never got caught up in that blizzard. I was on the other side of the Arena. We didn’t end up seeing any snow on that side.” 

She remembers now. The ice on the ground, the shivering flakes in the air; tributes stumbling, eventually crawling, eventually very still. None of them had thought to dig – she would’ve – a hole in the snow and bury yourself, it’s warmer that way. It’s how the dogs do it, in the northern part of the woods. Nobody expects it and nobody will find you, either.

“You kept shouting about some wolves,” Blight tells her. “There weren’t any wolves in your Games.”

She laughs. The end of her cigarette flares.

“We’re Victors, Blight,” she says. “We lie down with the wolves every day.”

\--

Her tributes this year aren’t very much to look at.

She knows from the very start that they won’t survive. Both of them have given up already – it’s in their eyes, the dumb, plodding steps of a pair of lambs to slaughter. One of them can climb, one of them can split logs, but neither of them have it in them to split apart skulls in the way that she did, carving meat away from the spine with her axe.

She doesn’t care. She’s Johanna Mason. She isn’t meant to care.

And anyway, it’s better off to be dead than to win.

\--

Finnick at her door: slumped and barely staying upright, blood trickling down from a cut above his eye.

“Jesus.” It startles out of her like a bird – she forgets that she’s heartless. “What the fuck happened?”

“Oh,” Finnick says, airily. He’s drunk and his voice wavers in the space between them, a badly tuned instrument, a shaky mirage. “The usual. A client got a bit carried away.”

“Which client?”

“Not permitted to divulge details, sweetheart, sorry.”

She hauls him in. He smells coppery. He looks terrible, rumpled, half-dead, his green eyes with a drug-induced sheen to them, a poisonous colour in the yellow light. She doesn’t feel like carrying him so she deposits him against the wall where he sways from side to side like he’s still on the sea.

“Hey.” She snaps her fingers in front of his face. “Finnick. Golden boy. I can’t carry you.”

“Right,” he says. He nods at her. “Okay.”

She does end up carrying him for part of the way, his arm slung across her shoulders. When she peels his shirt off – not much of a shirt to start with anyway, Finnick never wears a proper shirt – the bruises and welts bloom beneath her fingertips. Watercolour shades of blue, purple, green. Loving brushstrokes following the curve of his ribs, mottled into a hand’s grip at the base of his throat.

It’s nothing that Finnick can’t handle, but she sees red all the same. “The fucking pigs.”

“You got anything here to drink?”

“Aren’t you drunk already?”

“Not drunk enough,” Finnick says.

There was a Victor some years ago who killed herself. They got to her family soon after, butchered them in their sleep, blamed it on some new-fangled zoonotic disease – this was District 10, it was plausible – then quarantined the house. 

“Can’t help but think she had the right idea,” she says, out loud.

Finnick looks at her, bleary-eyed. “What?”

His breath rasps against his teeth. She looks more closely: they’ve broken a few of his ribs.

Tomorrow, after his prep team is through with him, he will emerge, fresh-faced, beautiful, back into the world. His body will be polished smooth, without a blemish. He’ll smile. The cameras will believe it.

They all wear their scars beneath their skin.

\--

She never had an Annie.

That’s a lie.

\--

Some years later, after all that speculation, it comes to a head.

They’re at somebody’s party or other. The details not important. There’s a thin sheen of sweat on Finnick’s shoulders where she’s dug in her nails, where she’s leaving tram-tracks on his skin. His mouth, biting furiously at her throat. His thigh shoved in recklessly between hers.

She laughs, a low and ugly sound. “So you _do_ get angry, once in a while.”

“I’m always angry,” he says. He sinks in his teeth. “I just don’t show it.”

They grapple with each other – it gets violent for a while, as everything around her usually does. It’s fine. She’s tired of gentleness. She’s tired of what it means. It’s better to hurt, to make your presence felt. 

Afterwards, they lie naked together side by side on the floor.

He finds the scar on her stomach, invisible but easily felt. “What’s this?”

“A scar.”

“I know _that_. Where’s it from?”

She blows some cigarette smoke into his face. “A wolf. Back at home, when I was a kid.”

The hot smell of blood on their breath. The grey fur, silvered in parts, slithering in and out of the dappled sun of the forests; her heart in her mouth, the axe too heavy for her hands. The cedars, tall and unforgiving. Watching her. Waiting for her to die. 

Her fingers, holding the cigarette, have started to shake.

“Who’s Larch?” Finnick says out of the blue.

She pauses. “I don’t know a Larch,” she says, shortly.

“Blight says you call out for him all the time in your sleep.”

“I don’t know a Larch,” she repeats.

Finnick turns his face to watch her, careful. “I heard a rumour in the Capitol.”

“Fuck you,” she snaps. She sits up, throws the cigarette away. It disappears somewhere underneath a cabinet, where she hopes it will set fire to something. “You don’t know anything. You and your fucking rumours. I’m leaving.”

“They killed him, didn’t they?”

“I don’t know. I don’t care.”

“Why didn’t you do what they wanted?” Finnick asks. His eyes are shuttered, the expression in them unreadable. “They would’ve threatened you with him, right?”

“They didn’t get a chance to threaten me,” she says.

There’s silence for a moment. He’s watching her, and she’s watching him.

Finally, she bends down to snatch up her dress. 

“He killed himself before they got to him,” she says. “To protect me. So I wouldn’t have to make the choice.” Her hand comes up angrily, swipes at something wet on her cheek. “The fucking idiot.”

She slams the door behind her as she leaves.

\--

With the right combination of pills, she can accomplish peace.

She is back in District 7. Back amongst the cedars, their fragrant chips in her hand, the spray of sawdust like powdered sun whenever the afternoon light struck them in the right way. Back with the comfortable, hefty ache inside her shoulders. The snapping crumble of leaves at her feet. 

When she was a child, she used to stand in the middle of the woods and tell her way by scent: here, a poplar; here, a pine; here, some sandalwood, the fragrance of the bark, the way she could tell wood apart by the sound her knuckles made on it. The sun, weak this far down from filtering in through the leaves. Vines. The moisture brewing before a storm – the way her bones had felt, almost saturated with it. 

_Jo_ , her mother used to call her. _Jo_. Artless. A pet name. 

The name of a child.

\--

She knows now that she never did outrun that pack of wolves. She gave them a taste of her blood: and now they want more. 

**Author's Note:**

> For updates on any future fics, feel free to add me on [Tumblr](http://epistolica.tumblr.com), [LiveJournal](http://epistolic.livejournal.com), or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/#!/epistolic)! ♥


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